Tiptree Fellowships 2016

The deadline for the second year of the Tiptree Fellowships program is coming up on September 1. The Tiptree Fellowships are my main project within the James Tiptree, Jr Award organization. Here’s information about the Fellowships:

We know that members of historically underrepresented communities are creating a lot of the most important work, with less recognition from the world at large than members of communities with higher visibility. And we know that emerging writers and creators are rarely paid for their labor, even when they produce and publish work that finds an audience. We want to support the development of new work, in any form or genre, that uses speculative narrative to expand or explore our understanding of gender, especially in its intersections with race, nationality, class, disability, sexuality, age, and other categories of identification and structures of power.

In 2015, we awarded the first Tiptree Fellowships. Fellowships are $500 per recipient and will continue to be awarded each year to two creators who are doing work that pushes forward the Tiptree mission. We hope to create a network of Fellows who will build connections, support one another, and find collaborators. We imagine that some of the works we support now might even win the Tiptree Award one day. We hope to change the field of speculative fiction by providing recognition for new voices that have been under-represented, but whose work is vital in making visible the many forces that are changing gender today and tomorrow. Applications for 2016 Fellowships are due on September 1.

The Tiptree Fellows can be writers, artists, scholars, media makers, remix artists, performers, musicians, or something else entirely. If you are doing work that is changing the way we think about gender through speculative narrative – maybe in a form we would recognize as the science fiction or fantasy genre, maybe in some other way – you will be eligible for a Fellowship. You won’t have to be a professional or have an institutional affiliation, as we hope to support emerging creators who don’t already have institutional support for their work.

If you’re working on something speculative, in any format and even please consider submitting. The application process is not hugely arduous, and we encourage all kinds of creators, regardless of whether you have professional aspirations or institutional affiliations. I can’t wait to discover who we will honor this year…